


Worse Things Have Happened

by Bawgdan



Category: Gangsta. (Anime & Manga)
Genre: F/M, Ficlet, Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-04-06 23:13:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19072642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bawgdan/pseuds/Bawgdan
Summary: We spend the entirety of our lives searching for purpose, when really, there is none.





	Worse Things Have Happened

**Author's Note:**

> “Women want to be loved like roses. They spend hours perfecting their eyebrows and toes and inventing irresistible curls that fall by accident down the back of their necks from otherwise austere hair-dos. They want their lover to remember the way they held a glass. They want to haunt.” ~Eve Babitz

.

...

.

Cool is just as much of an aesthetic as it is a state of mind. Some folks are born with it, sometimes it's a rite of passage. It's a rare trait like truth-telling. Worick and Nicolas are the kind of cool you can't buy out of a catalog magazine. If Alex could keep up with the time of day, she might be able to replicate their calm collectiveness, but she is perpetually a bull in a china shop.

As the sun moves from the middle of the sky to west, Alex stares at the phone. She wiggles her knees together. The heat makes her skin soft and sweaty. This is how she spends most of her days now. Sweaty, mildly irritated with herself for not being able to remember that important thing Worick asked her to grab from the store. She can only remember watching his Adam's apple dip as he chugs a gallon of orange juice.

Simple things like dates evade her, like her brain is trying to hide something significant. During her attempt at remembering, she loses her patience. She wasn't born with cool and at this rate, she will never learn how to obtain it.

Alex picks up the phone, starts to dial a random number, but drops it back down on the receiver. Who the hell is she going to call? 

Time continues to get away from her.

Evening arrives, drowning one corner of the room in a red-orange glow. It's hotter inside. Alex's ass crack sweats, but it doesn't bother her. She stops staring at the damn phone and notices the half-smoked cigarette Worick left behind on his way out. 

Alex gets an idea. If she can't simply 'be' cool, she can pretend in the privacy of her aloneness. She swipes the cigarette from the ashtray and heads for the stove. The gas clicks when she turns it on a medium hotness. Before poking the cigarette into the fire, she examines. It doesn't trigger any memories. Doesn't even help with remembering what it is she was supposed to grab for apartment.

Alex lights it on the gas stove, inhales like Worick, with the affect of some bad guy in a movie before he is about to rob a bank. The smoke swells inside of her mouth, goes down the wrong tunnel and she coughs violently. 

The door clicks open as she spits up and coughs at the same time into the trashcan. It takes two minutes for her to regain composure, but her head spins. _Cool_ might not be her thing after all. 

 

Nicolas watches her hurriedly cut off the stove and scramble back towards the ashtray to put the damn thing out. 

Worick is dreamily text book cool. Nicolas is colder than a corpse when it comes to unflappability. Well, it seems this way to Alex. On the surface he is uncomfortably stoic. What the lady-mags call emotionally unavailable and disinterested. Sometimes, Alex waves it off as admiration for him, but she has a history of orbiting men with problems. 

That old lady tells her every time she sees her.

She doesn't know why she waits for him to respond. He never does. Nicolas breaks their awkward and too long eye contact. Shrugging out of his suit jacket and neatly hanging it on the wall. He walks by her and smells like a mix of cologne and sweat.

One could make the argument that Alex is also emotionally unavailable like Nicolas. He drops his body like dead weight onto the couch. The rickety fan blows hot air across his face. He stays like that. Closing his eyes.

She noticed a few days ago that he never takes off his shoes.

"Did you get the toilet paper?" Nicolas's jagged timbre startles her spine straight.

So that's what she had forgotten.

.

..

.

**Author's Note:**

> Oh god I don't even know what to tag this. I just had an itch.


End file.
